ILARIA DEL MONTE

Ilaria Del Monte is a contemporary storyteller, a magician who invents tales infused with spells and inhabited by enchanted characters. She masters a powerful and intense painting, a legacy of the great Italian Novecento. In her canvases, echoes of De Chirico and Carrà, of Casorati and the more recent Balthus can be felt, as well as suggestions that can be traced back to our Quattrocento. The artist reinterprets these lessons and returns them to us with the tip of her brush through her interiors, where graceful female figures converse with talking animals like young and beautiful witches.

The legacy of the greatest surrealist painters has been taken up in Italy by Ilaria Del Monte, who continues the discourse initiated by Leonora Carrington in her mysterious rooms—inhabited by floating horses or horned creatures seated at laden tables—and shifts it toward a feminine fable about sisterhood and sharing, woven with secret whispers or perhaps electric connections between girls who are both queens and prisoners in enchanted environments, where objects come to life and the flowers of the wallpapers grow and proliferate, infesting the space. Her magical play also closely recalls another great surrealist, Remedios Varo, who caged the Moon and turned it into a pet to be fed with a spoon.

Born in Taranto in 1985 and raised in Montescaglioso, a town just a few kilometers from Matera, Ilaria has shown a particular enthusiasm for drawing and music since childhood. At the age of eleven, she entered the Conservatory of Music in Matera, where she studied piano until she was sixteen. She then moved to Milan, graduating in Visual Arts from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, completing her specialization in 2010. Since 2010, she has held several solo exhibitions in Milan, Ravenna, Como, Lecce, Venice, and Berlin. Her first solo exhibition, "Vento dal Nulla," took place in Venice in 2011, followed by "Window’s Tales" in Como. She has exhibited in group shows in Russia, Korea, Belgium, and Germany, and has received recognition such as the Credere la Luce award in 2019. Her works are part of public and private collections in Italy and abroad, attracting the interest of critics and collectors. She lives and works between Matera and Milan.